It stopped on Wynonna’s backpack, dropped delicately to the right of the door. An electric cord was sticking out of the open zipper.

Bingo.

I plopped myself in front of her backpack, cross-legged, and rifled through the contents. The computer—a silver MacBook covered in stickers—was easy enough to locate. It was tucked in a fabric slot designed for laptops. I pulled it out carelessly—not realizing the electric cord was still plugged into it, and most of said cord was tangled beneath Wynonna’s ultra-graffitied notebooks, several papers and assignments, and a small shoe box covered in some sort of scrapbooking treachery. So basically, when the laptop came out, so did all of Wynonna’s shit—the shoe box, the notebooks, dozens of papers—spilling all over the floor.

“Crap!” I hissed.

I stopped pulling on the laptop. Gently slid it back into its pocket. I then gathered all the papers and assignments and notebooks and attempted to stack and arrange them how they probably—hopefully—had been organized. Carefully, I slid them back inside. Then I turned my attention to the shoe box. Every square inch was covered in a scrapbook-style arrangement of pictures.

All the pictures were of Holden Durden.

FOUR

WHAT IN THE HOLY name of fuck?

I hovered over the shoe box. Studied the pictures—just to make sure that my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. That this wasn’t some water-in-the-desert optical illusion. Surely this was just someone who looked like Holden from a distance, but when you looked closer, you realized the guy was actually six feet tall with a giant mole on his face, and his name was Pierre because he was a foreign exchange student from France. Theoretically.

I leaned forward. Absorbed the images.

Nope. It was Holden.

If that wasn’t already the damnedest thing, there was also the nature of the photos to consider. Holden was never looking at the camera. Never. These were paparazzi-type pictures, taken at school while he was going about his daily routine—in the halls, at his locker, eating in the cafeteria. This meant that I was in a majority of these pictures—at least, I would be, except that I had been mostly cut out, and when I wasn’t, I was just a human-colored smudge in the background.

I lifted the lid off the shoe box. Inside was a portable cassette recorder/player—a super retro–looking one at that—and a series of colorful cassette tapes stacked to the side. No two tapes were the same color. A strip of cardboard acted as a divider, keeping everything wedged in place.

I pulled out a cassette tape—a yellow one—and examined it. I realized it had been spray-painted that color. There was no label.

I removed the cassette recorder. A pair of headphones was already plugged in and wrapped around it. I unwound the headphones and pressed the open button.